Invention:
This technology is an application for the collection and management of vegetation data and related information that can be used with a geographic information system (GIS) to visualize the data.
Background:
The U.S. federal government is the single largest landowner in the country via their control of approximately 640M acres of land across the Bureau of Land Management, Fish & Wildlife Service, the National Parks Service, and the U.S. Forest Service. These organizations need a means of continually monitoring the state of the land and modeling trends over time. There are currently very few solutions available to do this. Typically, researchers and government employees use tools like Excel Spreadsheets to track and store their data and therefore a need has arisen for a tool more specifically tailored for vegetation management.
Applications:
- Monitoring of BLM grazing land for overuse
- Tracking of endangered plant species
- Environmental impact studies
- Land reclamation tracking
Advantages:
- Provides a simplistic user interface
- Offers the ability to centrally store data
- Open source
- Planned multiplatform compatibility
